Aima.43 net.general utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!houxi!floyd!cmcl2!esquire!ima!johnl Wed Mar 10 17:50:15 1982 Book report There are now two books on the market that are supposed to be readable introductions to the UNIX system. These are: "Using the Unix System" [Gauthier, Richard, (RLG), Reston Publishing] This book appeared last summer. It starts off with an introduction for the novice user and finishes with detailed instructions on system management. It is full of typographical and factual errors. It is best summed up by the review which appeared in the Nov. 1981 ACM Computing Reviews: "The UNIX Community has long awaited a book that tells how to use UNIX ... With the publication of this book the UNIX community is still looking." "A User Guide to the UNIX System" [Thomas, R.A. and Yates, J., Osborne/McGraw Hill, $15.99] This book was released in January and was on display at USENIX. It is intended for the begining to novice computer user. It contains a tutorial section, from login to grep. It is well laid out with lots of good graphics. The last sections talk about applications such as Office Automation. There is an 80 page section on UNIX System Resources, who has what for UNIX. I read the Yates and Thomas book and was unimpressed. The first chapter which purports to explain where Unix comes from and what the acronym stands for is a scream. It's not terribly accurate, though. It suggests a grand corporate vision at Bell Labs rather than the rather haphazard truth. "The system was christened the UNIX system, a reference to the unified, team-programming environment it would serve." Jeez. The second "what is a computer" chapter is adequate but suggests that you can get an optical disk unit for $6,000 and that the only kind of fast printer is a drum printer. The tutorial and "reference" chapters are sort of OK, although I get the distinct impression that the authors' understanding of Unix is far less complete than they think it is. They seem to think that "a | b" is a shell script and don't mention that you can put commands in a file and make up new commands of your own, which is pretty important. The fifth chapter on "office automation" is just silly and extremely misleading. (It was excerpted in Computerworld a few weeks ago). They make inane statements like "The Unix System supports office automation" and completely fail to distinguish between what vanilla Unix does, what various enhanced Unixes do, and what they think is just neat. For example, on page 374 they refer to BBN's InfoMail but neglect to mention that it does not now run on any Unix system and probably never will. On page 381 they suggest that you can send a mail message to a photocopying machine and make 500 copies of it, which some souped up Unixes may do but Bell V7 and 3.0 do not. They talk about facsimile transmission, which has nothing to do with Unix at all. The "resources" chapter probably has the names and addresses right, but the descriptions of who offers what are again garbled. It is only here that they bother to mention that Bell doesn't support Unix. They don't appear to know about uucp and Usenet, which I would think is quite an important Unix resource. So I would be forced to say that the Yates and Thomas book is better than the other one, but that only the tutorial sections are worth reading. John Levine decvax!{cca,yale-co}!ima!johnl chico!esquire!ima!johnl ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.